Abstract
Nicole Rafter’s Crime of All Crimes is an ambitious, comprehensive, and at times masterful application of criminological and sociological analysis to the study of genocide—truly a crowning achievement for a nearly unparalleled career. The book seeks to understand both the characteristics and causes of genocide through a comparative-historical analysis of eight 20th-century genocides, all while illuminating the ways in which criminology can contribute to the study of genocide. As an interdisciplinary collaboration toward a social problem, criminology has much to contribute to genocide studies—and simultaneously much to learn from how well or poorly its theories apply to the study of genocide, because the idea of a state perpetrating rather than defining crime turns many of criminology’s unquestioned “basic assumptions inside out” (p. 16). In other words, this book claims its identity as a critical criminology of genocide, for given the core assumptions of mainstream criminology, there can be no other kind.
Rafter’s study begins and ends with cautious optimism toward criminology’s potential to study genocide. The caution stems from criminologists’ past complicity in state oppression from the eugenics movements to Nazi genocides themselves. After all, criminology itself is “largely a product of the Global North,” such that many criminologists are socialized to focus on street crime above all else and to assume, at least until recently, that genocides “were thought to have occurred elsewhere” (p. 4). Indeed, the standard assumptions of individual-level, street-crime theories have trouble with the meso- and macro-level perpetrators and dynamics that characterize genocide. Yet, as the comparative criminology in this book shows, the interdisciplinary field has developed over time, provides flexibility as an analytical frame, and includes orientation toward social justice—each of which has much to contribute to the study of genocide. Similarly, more sociological theories of crime, especially those that speak to structural and political dynamics or focus on collective victimization, play a key role in this comparative analysis and present many opportunities for future study.
The first paragraph of the second chapter is one of the best and clearest descriptions of what genocide actually is—as a crime, as a concept, as a lived experience—that I have had the pleasure of reading. Rafter conceptualizes genocide as crime of social death and relies upon the United Nations’ (UN) definition of genocide, but this paragraph and the analysis that follows build upon decades of scholarship to describe concisely and accessibly what it means to conceptualize genocide as a process of social destruction and why we should do so. From this foundation, the book finds firm ground to analyze genocide as a social process that unfolds throughout macro-, meso-, and micro-sociological levels.
The comparative approach allows the book to show several key patterns in genocides, from the Katyn Forest massacre to the Holocaust: they tend to happen before, during, or after wars and to involve ethnic or other “cleansing”; génocidaires tend to be young, male military leaders from the same conflict who mobilize special forces with an expectation of impunity; and victims tend to be less powerful, non-suspecting groups not directly involved with the war at hand, who are instead negatively labeled, lacked guardians, and are ultimately killed, ostracized, and completely erased from history. The empirical analysis also shows that genocides tend to arise through extreme violence permeating a society from complex, multicausal sources, as opposed to some centralized state plan or policy. The Herero genocide, for instance, reveals the macro-micro-macro dynamics between racist-colonialist ideologies, individual-level interactions, anger, and manipulations and resulting societal-level anomie that worked in tandem with state failure to cause the genocide.
The book’s macro-level analysis also identifies two key factors that characterize all eight cases: genocide is always associated with war before, during, or after it, and genocide is always accompanied by leaders’ expectations of impunity. Other factors that create a genocidal propensity include colonization and decolonization, actual or impending state failure, increasing polarization along ethnic and racial (and perhaps other) divisions, powerful ideologies—especially colonialist ones grounded in racial or ethnic superiority—and a recent history of mass violence committed with impunity. Interestingly, the findings also show that two commonly invoked macro-level factors do not have a causal influence: neither authoritarian regime type nor impoverishment caused these genocides, but were instead spurious with factors such as state failure. The evidence also supports a long view toward the evolution of genocidal violence throughout waves of global conflict: genocides are becoming smaller and more localized while colonialist and ideological factors play less of a role over time.
Meso-level factors are perhaps the most understudied elements of the genocidal process, making Rafter’s contributions here particularly important. The book takes a relatively new angle on group-level dynamics, focusing on emotional and framing processes within perpetrator groups. Genocides develop through identity frames that characterize perpetrator groups as the core members of the nation—complete with the racial and ethnic othering implicated within the concept of the “nation”—and thereby characterize victim groups as non-national, inferior outsiders. These powerfully divisive identity constructions need not even hold together or be consistent, as the book shows through the ways “communist” was fluidly repurposed during the Indonesian genocide. They need to only provide stereotype-derived motive and affective activation for genocidal violence, leading perpetrators to feel obligation toward each other while experiencing explosive, intense “hot” emotions and sometimes “cold,” calculating cruelty that translates into acts of violence.
Rafter also presents a novel, micro-level theory of the psychosocial process through which individuals come to perpetrate genocidal violence. Called “splitting,” this process encompasses the ways ordinary people locate themselves and their victims in totally separate, dichotomous social spaces: themselves and their own group as utterly virtuous, and targeted peoples as completely evil, with no middle ground or room for ambiguity. Rather than a straightforward application of hateful motives or dehumanization (factors that are empirically absent in many of the cases), Rafter argues genocidal violence takes place through a three-stage process through which perpetrators disengage from or neutralize the need for moral responsibility, switch off feelings of empathy, and objectify targeted individuals into simplistic threats to be destroyed or discarded. The Khmer Rouge’s development and genocidal actions illuminate the splitting process, and future studies will certainly want to test and build upon this theory and its interdisciplinary insights.
Following the multidimensional analysis of genocide’s causes, the book fleshes out how states prepare and administer genocide, how gender and mass rape figure into genocide, and ultimately how genocidal processes end. Using the examples of the Armenian Special Organization and the Reich Committee who led the Nazi genocide against the disabled, it shows how governments create “states of exception,” temporary legal exemptions for killing that occurred in all eight cases, and develop genocidal organizations—typically paramilitary, mostly male groups trained for mass killing and granted an expectation of impunity from standard rules of conduct. In addition to empowering such criminal proxies, states also. The Rwandan example further shows the gendered dimensions of genocide, with perpetrators generally being men enacting extreme versions of masculinity, women perpetrators acting within their distinct social roles, men victims more frequently facing killing, and women victims more often facing sexual violence (but neither kind of victimization being gender-exclusive). Moreover, Rafter uses the Rwandan case to add her voice to the increasing chorus calling for international scholarship and law to recognize mass rape itself as genocidal when it aims to destroy the targeted group itself.
On that note, the book turns to a discussion of when, if ever, genocides end: when the last murder victim dies, when the last rape victim gives birth, when victims’ sense of injustice and emptiness are resolved? From one perspective, genocides can end when perpetrators reach their goals and halt the violence, when they desist through exhaustion or disintegration, when victims resist or flee, when outside parties intervene, or when they end through attrition, such as through the slow assimilation of settler colonialism. From a different, more victim-oriented perspective, genocides can end on specific dates or events, more slowly through petering out, or can appear to persist indefinitely or unclearly, as shown by the Guatemalan case that subsided “sometime in 1983” but reverberated for decades (p. 186). Indeed, as the book clearly shows, genocides’ “aftermath,” if we can call it that, can last perpetually as victims grieve the loss of their friends, family, and culture.
If the book has a weakness, it is that it covers so much about genocide from a processual, multi-dimensional perspective that it does not completely illuminate the dynamics at each level or part of the process. But that general focus is also a core part of Rafter’s stated mission: to analyze what genocides have in common with one another and with other types of crime in order to illuminate an agenda for future criminological (and other social-scientific) research. As she convincingly argues, rather than unthinkably exceptional, “genocide is similar in many ways to ordinary violent crime and can be profitably studied in the ways that ordinary violent crime is studied”: through patterns and parallels, both across genocides and between genocide and other crimes (p. 52).